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A HISTORY OF THE

CAR BOMB

TREASON PRESS
canberratreason@yahoo.com.au
http://treason.metadns.cx MIKE DAVIS
The shock waves from the March dirty bombs also rattled windows on the Hudson River, where New
York Police Department (NYPD) experts warned the media that poor security at local chemical plants CONTENTS
raised the danger of copy-cat attacks using stolen ingredients. An anonymous senior official in the
department’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau told Reuters that “the NYPD expected would-be attackers
targeting New York to try to import the tactic.” At the same time, New Jersey’s two Democratic Senators
1. Introduction 4
– Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg – complained that the Bush administration was coddling
the chemical industry by blocking New Jersey and other states from implementing tougher safety 2. Part 1: The Poor Man’s Air Force 5
regulations.
Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the chlorine clouds and the truck bombs have deflected U.S. troops into
a massive, desperate hunt for the “makeshift car-bomb factories” that Major General William Caldwell, 3. Part 2: Return to Sender 13
chief spokesman for the Surge, claims proliferate in the gritty suburbs and industrial estates that ring
Baghdad.
The image of a clandestine car-bomb industry, by the way, is rich with irony. Baghdad’s factory
4. The Missing WMD: In Trucks in Iraq 21
belt contains hundreds of state-owned and private factories that once manufactured canned food, tiles,
baby clothes, transit buses, fertilizers, commercial glass, and the like. Since the American invasion,
however, the plants are idle, if not derelict, and their once integrated Sunni-Shiite workforces are
bunkered down, jobless, in increasingly sectarian neighborhoods. Unemployment in greater Baghdad
is variously estimated in the 40-60% range.
It is unlikely that the current raids – using troops who would otherwise be securing streets and
“winning hearts and minds” – will uncover more than a tiny fraction of the city’s bomb “factories.”
Indeed, the car bomb – even more than the roadside bombs (IEDs) that are filling the Humvee junkyards
– has proven globally to be an almost invincible weapon of the ill-armed and underfunded, as well as
the one weapon of mass destruction that the Bush administration has totally ignored. None of the
American commanders in the field in 2003-2004, much less the imperial daydreamers in neoconservative
think-tanks back in Washington, seem to have foreseen the ubiquity of its use.
According to a national cross-sectional cluster sample survey of mortality in Iraq since the U.S.
invasion, carried out by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and
Iraqi physicians (organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad), an estimated 78,000 Iraqis
were killed by several thousand vehicle bombings between March 2003 to June 2006. Moreover, as I
explain in my newly-published history of the car bomb, Buda’s Wagon, there is little hope for any
technological fix or scientific miracle that will allow reliable detection of a stolen Mercedes with 500
pounds of C-4 in the trunk or a dump truck laden with chlorine tanks and high explosives idling in one
of Baghdad’s colossal traffic jams. Checkpoints? Just a synonym for target of opportunity.
In the meantime, the bombers are obviously wagering that if they can sustain current levels of
carnage, the Shiite militias will be forced back onto the streets to protect their neighborhoods (as the
American troops can’t), risking a bloody, all-out confrontation with U.S. forces for the ownership of
the vast Shiite slum of Sadr City and other Shiite areas in eastern Baghdad. On the other side, Lieutenant
General David Petraeus, counterinsurgency expert and mastermind of the Surge, must shut down the
car-bombers by the beginning of the summer or face a likely popular revolt in Sadr City. With each
explosion, his chances of success diminish.

22
INTRODUCTION THE MISSING WMD: IN TRUCKS IN IRAQ
Have the car-bombers already defeated the surge? The weapon no one can stop
This pamphlet contains a short history of the car bomb published in April 2006 by the prolific American
Marxist author Mike Davis. It also contains a short article, written in March 2007, about the recent use Despite heroic reassurances from both the White House and the Pentagon that the six-week-old U.S.
of car bombs in Baghdad and their effect on the new US ‘surge’ strategy for defeating the Iraqi insurgency. escalation in Baghdad and al-Anbar Province is proceeding on course, suicide car-bombers continue
A book length version of the history of the car bomb, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, to devastate Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods, often under the noses of reinforced American patrols and
has recently been published. checkpoints. Indeed, February was a record month for car bombings, with at least 44 deadly explosions
in Baghdad alone, and March promises to duplicate the carnage.
Mike Davis is the author of numerous books most of which are well worth reading. They include two Car bombs, moreover, continue to evolve in horror and lethality. In January and March, the first
excellent books about Los Angeles, City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear and the groundbreaking Planet chemical “dirty bomb” explosions took place using chlorine gas, giving potential new meaning to the
of Slums which deals with the massive expansion of slums around the world. His recent shorter pieces, President’s missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The sectarian guerrillas who claim affiliation
including the ones in this pamphlet, can be found at the TomDispatch website, www.tomdispatch.com with “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” are now striking savagely, and seemingly at will, against dissident
Sunni tribes in al-Anbar province as well as Shiite areas of Baghdad and Shiite pilgrims on the highways
The front cover depicts the art installation Attack #9 in Toronto made by the Montreal group Socially to the south of the capital. With each massacre, the bombers refute Bush administration claims that the
Acceptable Terrorist Acts. U.S. military can “take back and secure” Baghdad block-by-block or establish its own patrols and new,
The back cover shows one of the many car bombs to have been set off in Baghdad since the US-led fortified mini-bases as a realistic substitute for local self-defense militias.
invasion. On February 23rd, for instance, shortly after the beginning of the “Surge,” a suicide truck-bomber
killed 36 Sunnis in Habbaniya, west of Baghdad, after an imam at a local mosque had denounced al-
Canberra, Australia Qaeda. Ten days later, a kamikaze driver ploughed his truck bomb into Baghdad’s famed literary
April 2007 bazaar, the crowded corridor of bookstores and coffee houses along Mutanabi Street, incinerating at
least 30 people and, perhaps, the last hopes of an Iraqi intellectual renaissance.
On March 10th, another suicide bomber massacred 20 people in Sadr City, just a few hundred
yards away from one of the new U.S. bases. The next day, a bomber rammed his car into a flatbed truck
full of Shiite pilgrims, killing more than 30. A week later, horror exceeded itself when a car bomber
evidently used two little children as a decoy to get through a military checkpoint, then exploded the car
with the kids still in the back seat.
In a demonstration of a tactic that has proven especially deadly over the past year, a car-bomb
attack on March 23rd was coordinated with an assailant in a suicide vest and almost killed Deputy
Prime Minister Salam al-Zubaie, whose tribal alliance, the Anbar Salvation Council, has accepted
funding from the Americans and been denounced by the jihadis.
When it comes to the development of suicide vehicles, however, the most alarming innovation has,
without doubt, been the debut in January of truck bombs carrying chlorine gas tanks rigged with
explosives. Of course, “dirty bombs,” usually of the nuclear variety, have been a longtime obsession of
anti-terrorism experts (as well as the producers of TV potboilers), but the sinister glamour of radioactive
devices – scattering deadly radiological waste in the City of London or across midtown Manhattan –
has tended to overshadow the far greater likelihood that bomb-makers would initially be attracted to
the cheapness and ease of combining explosives with any number of ordinary industrial caustics and
toxins.
As if to emphasize that poison-gas explosions were now part of their standard arsenal, sectarian
bombers – identified, as usual, by the American military as members of “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia” –
unleashed three successive chlorine suicide-bomb attacks on March 16th against Sunni towns outside
of Fallujah. The two largest attacks involved dump trucks loaded with 200-gallon chlorine tanks.
Aside from the dozens wounded or killed by the direct explosions, at least another 350 people were
stricken by the yellow-green clouds of chlorine.
As in April 1915, with the first uses of chlorine gas on the Western Front in World War I, these
explosions sowed widespread panic, underlining – as the bombers no doubt intended – the inability of
the Americans to protect potential allies in al-Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency.
(The recent discovery of stocks of chlorine and nitric acid in a Sunni neighborhood of west Baghdad
will hardly assuage those fears.)

4 21
pornographic DVDs to soldiers. Sheik Fuad Rashid, the US-appointed imam of the local mosque, PART 1: THE POOR MAN’S AIR FORCE
dresses like a nun, dyes his hair platinum blond and claims that Mary Mother of Jesus appeared to
him in a vision (hence the getup). On any given night, residents can listen to karaoke, play badminton
Buda’s Wagon (1920)
or frequent one of several rowdy bars, including an invitation-only speakeasy run by the CIA.
“You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will dynamite you!” Anarchist warning 1919
Outside the Green Zone, of course, is the ‘Red Zone’ where ordinary Iraqis can be randomly and
unexpectedly blown to bits by car bombers or strafed by American helicopters. Not surprisingly, wealthy
On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti,
Iraqis and members of the new government are clamoring for admission to the security of the Green
a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall
Zone, but US officials told Newsweek last year that “plans to move the Americans out are ‘fantasy.’”
and Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly climbed down and
Billions have been invested in the Green Zone and a dozen other American enclaves officially known
disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found
for a period as “enduring camps,” and even prominent Iraqis have been left to forage for their own
strange leaflets warning: “Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!” They
security outside the blast walls of these exclusive bubble Americas. A population that has endured
were signed: “American Anarchist Fighters.” The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon.
Saddam’s secret police, U.N. sanctions, and American cruise missiles, now steels itself to survive the
When they stopped, the wagon – packed with dynamite and iron slugs – exploded in a fireball of
car bombers who prowl poor Shiite neighborhoods looking for grisly martyrdom. For the most selfish
shrapnel.
reasons, let us hope that Baghdad is not a metaphor for our collective future.
“The horse and wagon were blown to bits,” writes Paul Avrich, the celebrated historian of American
anarchism who uncovered the true story. “Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings
twelve stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a great cloud of dust enveloped
the area. In Morgan’s offices, Thomas Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a
rubble of plaster and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets.”
Buda was undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that J.P. Morgan himself was not among the
40 dead and more than 200 wounded – the great robber baron was away in Scotland at his hunting
lodge. Nonetheless, a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of scrap metal, and an old
horse had managed to bring unprecedented terror to the inner sanctum of American capitalism.
His Wall Street bomb was the culmination of a half-century of anarchist fantasies about avenging
angels made of dynamite; but it was also an invention, like Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, far
ahead of the imagination of its time. Only after the barbarism of strategic bombing had become
commonplace, and when air forces routinely pursued insurgents into the labyrinths of poor cities,
would the truly radical potential of Buda’s “infernal machine” be fully realized.
Buda’s wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of an inconspicuous vehicle,
anonymous in almost any urban setting, to transport large quantities of high explosive into precise
range of a high-value target. It was not replicated, as far as I have been able to determine, until January
12, 1947 when the Stern Gang drove a truckload of explosives into a British police station in Haifa,
Palestine, killing 4 and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-fascist splinter group led by Avraham
Stern that broke away from the right-wing Zionist paramilitary Irgun) would soon use truck and car
bombs to kill Palestinians as well: a creative atrocity immediately reciprocated by British deserters
fighting on the side of Palestinian nationalists.
Vehicle bombs thereafter were used sporadically – producing notable massacres in Saigon (1952),
Algiers (1962), and Palermo (1963) – but the gates of hell were only truly opened in 1972, when the
Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) accidentally, so the legend goes, improvised the first
ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) car bomb. These new-generation bombs, requiring only ordinary
industrial ingredients and synthetic fertilizer, were cheap to fabricate and astonishingly powerful: they
elevated urban terrorism from the artisanal to the industrial level, and made possible sustained blitzes
against entire city centers as well as the complete destruction of ferro-concrete skyscrapers and residential
blocks.
The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon that, under certain
circumstances, was comparable to airpower in its ability to knock out critical urban nodes and
headquarters as well as terrorize the populations of entire cities. Indeed, the suicide truck bombs that
A US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco , Firearms and Explosives diagram depicting the sizes of devastated the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 prevailed – at least in a geopolitical
various vehicle bombs.
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sense – over the combined firepower of the fighter-bombers and battleships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet and Some of the devices have been gigantic, like the stolen fuel-truck bomb that devastated Mussayib, but
forced the Reagan administration to retreat from Lebanon. what is most extraordinary has been their sheer frequency – in one 48-hour-period in July 2005 at least
Hezbollah’s ruthless and brilliant use of car bombs in Lebanon in the 1980s to counter the advanced 15 suicide car bombs exploded in or around Baghdad. The sinister figure supposedly behind the worst
military technology of the United States, France, and Israel soon emboldened a dozen other groups to of these massacres is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian arch-terrorist who reportedly criticized
bring their insurgencies and jihads home to the metropolis. Some of the new-generation car bombers Osama bin Laden for insufficient zeal in attacking domestic enemies like the “infidel Shias.” Al-
were graduates of terrorism schools set up by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (the ISI), with Saudi Zarqawi, it is claimed, is pursuing an essentially eschatological rather than political goal: a cleansing
financing, in the mid-1980s to train mujahedin to terrorize the Russians then occupying Afghanistan. of enemies without end until the Earth is ruled by a single, righteous caliphate.
Between 1992 and 1998, 16 major vehicle bomb attacks in 13 different cities killed 1,050 people and Toward this end, he – or those invoking his name – seems to have access to an almost limitless
wounded nearly 12,000. More importantly from a geopolitical standpoint, the IRA and Gama’a al- supply of bomb vehicles (some of them apparently stolen in California and Texas, then shipped to the
Islamiyya inflicted billions of dollars of damage on the two leading control-centers of the world economy Middle East) as well as Saudi and other volunteers eager to martyr themselves in flame and molten
– the City of London (1992, 1993, and 1996) and lower Manhattan (1993) – and forced a reorganization metal for the sake of taking a few Shiite school kids, market venders, or foreign “crusaders” with them.
of the global reinsurance industry. Indeed the supply of suicidal madrassa graduates seems to far exceed what the logic of suicide bombing
In the new millennium, 85 years after that first massacre on Wall Street, car bombs have become (as perfected by Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers) actually demands: Many of the explosions in Iraq
almost as generically global as iPods and HIV-AIDS, cratering the streets of cities from Bogota to Bali. could just as easily be detonated by remote control. But the car bomb – at least in Al-Zarqawi’s relentless
Suicide truck bombs, once the distinctive signature of Hezbollah, have been franchised to Sri Lanka, vision – is evidently a stairway to heaven as well as the chosen weapon of genocide.
Chechnya/Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Kuwait, and Indonesia. On any graph of urban terrorism, the curve But Al Zarqawi did not originate car bomb terrorism along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates;
representing car bombs is rising steeply, almost exponentially. US-occupied Iraq, of course, is a relentless that dark honor belongs to the CIA and its favorite son, Iyad Allawi. As the New York Times revealed in
inferno with more than 9,000 casualties – mainly civilian – attributed to vehicle bombs in the two-year June 2004:
period between July 2003 and June 2005. Since then, the frequency of car-bomb attacks has dramatically
increased: 140 per month in the fall of 2005, 13 in Baghdad on New Year’s Day 2006 alone. If roadside Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization intent on deposing
bombs or IEDs are the most effective device against American armoured vehicles, car bombs are the Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990s’s to plant bombs and sabotage
weapon of choice for slaughtering Shiite civilians in front of mosques and markets and instigating an government facilities under the direction of the CIA, several former intelligence officials say. Dr.
apocalyptic sectarian war. Allawi’s group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosives devices smuggled
Under siege from weapons indistinguishable from ordinary traffic, the apparatuses of administration into Baghdad from northern Iraq… One former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was based
and finance are retreating inside “rings of steel” and “green zones,” but the larger challenge of the car in the region, Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period ‘blew up a school bus;
bomb seems intractable. Stolen nukes, Sarin gas, and anthrax may be the “sum of our fears,” but the car schoolchildren were killed.’
bomb is the quotidian workhorse of urban terrorism. Before considering its genealogy, however, it may
be helpful to summarize those characteristics that make Buda’s wagon such a formidable and undoubtedly According to one of the Times’ informants, the bombing campaign, dead school kids and all, “was a
permanent source of urban insecurity. test more than anything else, to demonstrate capability.” It allowed the CIA to portray the then-exiled
First, vehicle bombs are stealth weapons of surprising power and destructive efficiency. Trucks, Allawi and his suspect group of ex-Baathists as a serious opposition to Saddam Hussein and an alternative
vans, or even SUVs can easily transport the equivalent of several conventional 1,000-pound bombs to to the coterie (so favored by Washington neoconservatives) around Ahmed Chalabi. “No one had any
the doorstep of a prime target. Moreover, their destructive power is still evolving, thanks to the constant problem with sabotage in Baghdad back then,” another CIA veteran reflected. “I don’t think anyone
tinkering of ingenious bomb-makers. We have yet to face the full horror of semi-trailer-sized explosions could have known how things would turn out today.”
with a lethal blast range of 200 yards or of dirty bombs sheathed in enough nuclear waste to render Today, of course, car bombs rule Iraq. In a June 2005 article entitled, “Why the car bomb is king in
mid-Manhattan radioactive for generations. Iraq,” James Dunnigan warned that it was supplanting the roadside bomb (which “are more frequently
Second, they are extraordinarily cheap: 40 or 50 people can be massacred with a stolen car and discovered, or defeated with electronic devices”) as the “most effective weapon” of Sunni insurgents
maybe $400 of fertilizer and bootlegged electronics. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 attack as well as of Al Zarqawi, and thus “the terrorists are building as many as they can.” The recent “explosive
on the World Trade Center, bragged that his most expensive outlay was in long-distance phone calls. growth” in car ownership in Iraq, he added, had made it “easier for the car bombs to just get lost in
The explosive itself (one half ton of urea) cost $3,615 plus the $59 per day rental for a ten-foot-long traffic.”
Ryder van. In contrast, the cruise missiles that have become the classic American riposte to overseas In this kingdom of the car bomb, the occupiers have withdrawn almost completely into their own
terrorist attacks cost $1.1 million each. forbidden city, the “Green Zone,” and their well-fortified and protected military bases. This is not the
Third, car bombings are operationally simple to organize. Although some still refuse to believe high-tech City of London with sensors taking the place of snipers, but a totally medievalized enclave
that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols didn’t have secret assistance from a government or dark surrounded by concrete walls and defended by M1 Abrams tanks and helicopter gunships as well as an
entity, two men in the proverbial phone booth – a security-guard and a farmer – successfully planned exotic corps of corporate mercenaries (including Gurkhas, ex-Rhodesian commandos, former British
and executed the horrendous Oklahoma City bombing with instructional books and information acquired SAS, and amnestied Colombian paramilitaries). Once the Xanadu of the Baathist ruling class, the 10-
from the gun-show circuit. square-kilometer Green Zone, as described by journalist Scott Johnson, is now a surreal theme park of
Fourth, like even the ‘smartest’ of aerial bombs, car bombs are inherently indiscriminate: “Collateral the American way of life:
damage” is virtually inevitable. If the logic of an attack is to slaughter innocents and sow panic in the
widest circle, to operate a “strategy of tension,” or just demoralize a society, car bombs are ideal. But Women in shorts and T-shirts jog down broad avenues and the Pizza Inn does a brisk business from
they are equally effective at destroying the moral credibility of a cause and alienating its mass base of the parking lot of the heavily fortified US Embassy. Near the Green Zone Bazaar, Iraqi kids hawk
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huge payouts by insurance companies,” commented the BBC shortly after Bishopsgate, “contributed support, as both the IRA and the ETA in Spain have independently discovered. The car bomb is an
to a crisis in the industry, including the near-collapse of the world’s leading [re]insurance market, inherently fascist weapon.
Lloyds of London.” German and Japanese investors threatened to boycott the City unless physical Fifth, car bombs are highly anonymous and leave minimal forensic evidence. Buda quietly went
security was improved and the government agreed to subsidize insurance costs. home to Italy, leaving William Burns, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Bureau of Investigation (later, to be
Despite a long history of London bombings by the Irish going back to the Fenians and Queen renamed the FBI) to make fools of themselves as they chased one false lead after another for a decade.
Victoria, neither Downing Street, nor the City of London Police had foreseen this scale of accurately Most of Buda’s descendants have also escaped identification and arrest. Anonymity, in addition, greatly
targeted physical and financial damage. (Indeed, Slab Murphy himself might have been surprised; like recommends car bombs to those who like to disguise their handiwork, including the CIA, the Israeli
the original ANFO bombs, these super-bombs were probably a wee bit of serendipity for the IRA.) The Mossad, the Syrian GSD, the Iranian Pasdaran, and the Pakistani ISI – all of whom have caused
City’s response was a more sophisticated version of the “ring of steel” (concrete barriers, high iron unspeakable carnage with such devices.
fences, and impregnable gates) that had been built around Belfast’s city center after Bloody Friday in
1972. Following Bishopsgate, the financial press clamored for similar protection: “The City should be Preliminary Detonations (1948-63)
turned into a medieval-style walled enclave to prevent terrorist attacks.”
What was actually implemented in the City and later in the Docklands was a technologically more “Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center” New York Times headline January 10, 1952
advanced network of traffic restrictions and cordons, CCTV cameras, including “24-hour Automated
Number Plate Recording (ANPR) cameras, linked to police databases,” and intensified public and The members of the Stern Gang were ardent students of violence, self-declared Jewish admirers of
private policing. “In the space of a decade,” writes Coaffee, “the City of London was transformed into Mussolini who steeped themselves in the terrorist traditions of the pre-1917 Russian Socialist-
the most surveilled space in the UK and perhaps the world with over 1500 surveillance cameras operating, Revolutionary Party, the Macedonian IMRO, and the Italian Blackshirts. As the most extreme wing of
many of which are linked to the ANPR system.” the Zionist movement in Palestine – “fascists” to the Haganah and “terrorists” to the British – they
Since September 11, 2001, this anti-terrorist surveillance system has been extended throughout were morally and tactically unfettered by considerations of diplomacy or world opinion. They had a
London’s core in the benign guise of Mayor Ken Livingstone’s celebrated “congestion pricing” scheme fierce and well-deserved reputation for the originality of their operations and the unexpectedness of
to liberate the city from gridlock. According to one of Britain’s major Sunday papers: their attacks. On January 12, 1947, as part of their campaign to prevent any compromise between
mainstream Zionism and the British Labor government, they exploded a powerful truck bomb in the
The Observer has discovered that MI5, Special Branch and the Metropolitan Police began secretly central police station in Haifa, resulting in 144 casualties. Three months later, they repeated the tactic
developing the system in the wake of the 11 September attacks. In effect, the controversial charging in Tel Aviv, blowing up the Sarona police barracks (5 dead) with a stolen postal truck filled with
scheme will create one of the most daunting defence systems protecting a major world city when it dynamite.
goes live a week tomorrow. It is understood that the system also utilizes facial recognition software In December 1947, following the UN vote to partition Palestine, full-scale fighting broke out
which automatically identifies suspects or known criminals who enter the eight-square-mile zone. between Jewish and Arab communities from Haifa to Gaza. The Stern Gang, which rejected anything
Their precise movements will be tracked by camera from the point of entry…However, civil liberty less than the restoration of a biblical Israel, now gave the truck bomb its debut as a weapon of mass
campaigners yesterday claimed that millions had been misled over the dual function of the scheme, terror. On January 4, 1948, two men in Arab dress drove a truck ostensibly loaded with oranges into the
promoted primarily as a means of reducing congestion in central London. center of Jaffa and parked it next to the New Seray Building, which housed the Palestinian municipal
government as well as a soup-kitchen for poor children. They cooly lingered for coffee at a nearby café
The addition in 2003 of this new panopticon traffic scan to London’s already extensive system of video before leaving a few minutes ahead of the detonation.
surveillance ensures that the average citizen is “caught on CCTV cameras 300 times a day.” It may “A thunderous explosion,” writes Adam LeBor in his history of Jaffa, “then shook the city. Broken
make it easier for the police to apprehend non-suicidal terrorists, but it does little to protect the city glass and shattered masonry blew out across Clock Tower Square. The New Seray’s centre and side
from well-planned and competently disguised vehicle bomb attacks. Blair’s “Third Way” has been a walls collapsed in a pile of rubble and twisted beams. Only the neo-classical façade survived. After a
fast lane for the adoption of Orwellian surveillance and the usurpation of civil liberties, but until some moment of silence, the screams began, 26 were killed, hundreds injured. Most were civilians, including
miracle technology emerges (and none is in sight) that allows authorities from a distance to “sniff” a many children eating at the charity kitchen.” The bomb missed the local Palestinian leadership who
molecule or two of explosive in a stream of rush-hour traffic, the car bombers will continue to commute had moved to another building, but the atrocity was highly successful in terrifying residents and setting
to work. the stage for their eventual flight.
It also provoked the Palestinians to cruel repayment in kind. The Arab High Committee had its
The “King” of Iraq (the 2000s) own secret weapon – blond-haired British deserters, fighting on the side of the Palestinians. Nine days
after the Jaffa bombing, some of these deserters, led by Eddie Brown, a former police corporal whose
“Insurgents exploded 13 car bombs across Iraq on Sunday, including eight in Baghdad within a three- brother had been murdered by the Irgun, commandeered a postal delivery truck which they packed
hour span.” Associated Press news report, January 1, 2006 with explosives and detonated in the center of Haifa’s Jewish quarter, injuring 50 people. Two weeks
later, Brown, driving a stolen car and followed by a five-ton truck driven by a Palestinian in a police
Car bombs – some 1,293 between 2004 and 2005, according to researchers at the Brookings Institution uniform, successfully passed through British and Haganah checkpoints and entered Jerusalem’s New
– have devastated Iraq like no other land in history. The most infamous, driven or left by sectarian City. The driver parked in front of the Palestine Post, lit the fuse, and then escaped with Brown in his
jihadists, have targeted Iraqi Shiites in front of their homes, mosques, police stations, and markets: 125 car. The newspaper headquarters was devastated with 1 dead and 20 wounded.
dead in Hilla (February 28, 2005); 98 in Mussayib (July 16); 114 in Baghdad (September 14); 102 in According to a chronicler of the episode, Abdel Kader el-Husseini, the military leader of the Arab
Blad (September 29); 50 in Abu Sayda (November 19); and so on. Higher Committee, was so impressed by the success of these operations – inadvertently inspired by the
18 7
Stern Gang – that he authorized an ambitious sequel employing six British deserters. “This time three in a replay of the simultaneous 1993 attacks on the Marines and the French in Beirut. Located near two
trucks were used, escorted by a stolen British armored car with a young blond man in police uniform of the busiest streets in the city without adequate setback or protective glacis, the Nairobi embassy was
standing in the turret.” Again, the convoy easily passed through checkpoints and drove to the Atlantic especially vulnerable, as Ambassador Prudence Bushnell had fruitlessly warned the State Department.
Hotel on Ben Yehuda Street. A curious night watchman was murdered when he confronted the gang, In the event, ordinary Kenyans – burnt alive in their vehicles, lacerated by flying glass, or buried in
who then drove off in the armored car after setting charges in the three trucks. The explosion was huge smoldering debris – were the principal victims of the huge explosion, which killed several hundred and
and the toll accordingly grim: 46 dead and 130 wounded. wounded more than 5,000. Another dozen people died and almost 100 were injured in Dar-es-Salaam.
The window of opportunity for such attacks – the possibility of passing from one zone to another Sublime indifference to the collateral carnage caused by its devices, including to innocent Moslems,
– was rapidly closing as Palestinians and Jews braced for all-out warfare, but a final attack prefigured remains a hallmark of operations organized by the Al-Qaeda network. Like his forerunners Hermann
the car bomb’s brilliant future as a tool of assassination. On March 11, the official limousine of the Goering and Curtis LeMay, Osama bin Laden seems to exult in the sheer statistics of bomb damage –
American consul-general, flying the stars and stripes and driven by the usual chauffeur, was admitted the competitive race to ever greater explosive yields and killing ranges. One of the most lucrative of his
to the courtyard of the heavily-guarded Jewish Agency compound. The driver, a Christian Palestinian recent franchises (in addition to air travel, skyscrapers, and public transport) has been car-bomb attacks
named Abu Yussef, hoped to kill Zionist leader David Ben Gurion, but the limousine was moved just on Western tourists in primarily Moslem countries, although the October 2002 attack on a Bali nightclub
before it exploded; nonetheless, 13 officials of the Jewish Foundation Fund died and 40 were injured. (202 dead) and the July 2005 bombing of hotels in Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh (88 dead) almost certainly
This brief but furious exchange of car bombs between Arabs and Jews would enter into the collective killed as many local workers as erstwhile “crusaders.”
memory of their conflict, but would not be resumed on a large scale until Israel and its Phalangist allies
began to terrorize West Beirut with bombings in 1981: a provocation that would awake a Shiite sleeping Form Follows Fear (the 1990s)
dragon. Meanwhile, the real sequel was played out in Saigon: a series of car and motorcycle bomb
atrocities in 1952-53 that Graham Greene incorporated into the plot of his novel, The Quiet American, “The car bomb is the nuclear weapon of guerrilla warfare.” Washington Post columnist Charles
and which he portrayed as secretly orchestrated by his CIA operative Alden Pyle, who is conspiring to Krauthammer
substitute a pro-American party for both the Viet-Minh (upon whom the actual bombings would be
blamed) and the French (who are unable to guarantee public safety). A “billion-pound explosion”? One meaning, of course, is the TNT yield of three or four Hiroshima-
The real-life Quiet American was the counterinsurgency expert Colonel Edward Lansdale (fresh size atomic weapons (which is to say, only a smidgen of the explosive power of a single H-bomb).
from victories against peasant Communists in the Philippines), and the real leader of the ‘Third Force’ Alternately, one billion (British) pounds ($1.45 billion) is what the IRA cost the City of London in
was his protégé, General Trinh Minh The of the Cao Dai religious sect. There is no doubt, writes The’s April 1993 when a blue dump-truck containing a ton of ANFO exploded on Bishopsgate Road across
biographer, that the general “instigated many terrorist outrages in Saigon, using clockwork plastic from the NatWest Tower in the heart of the world’s second major financial center. Although one bystander
charges loaded into vehicles, or hidden inside bicycle frames with charges. Notably, the Li An Minh was killed and more than 30 injured by the immense explosion, which also demolished a medieval
[The’s army] blew up cars in front of the Opera House in Saigon in 1952. These ‘time-bombs’ were church and wrecked the Liverpool Street station, the human toll was incidental to the economic damage
reportedly made of 50-kg ordnance, used by the French air force, unexploded and collected by the Li that was the true goal of the attack. Whereas the other truck bomb campaigns of the 1990s – Lima,
An Minh.” Bombay, Colombo, and so forth – had followed Hezbollah’s playbook almost to the letter, the
Lansdale was dispatched to Saigon by Allen Dulles of the CIA some months after the Opera atrocity Bishopsgate bomb, which Moloney describes as “the most successful military tactic since the start of
(hideously immortalized in a Life photographer’s image of the upright corpse of a rickshaw driver with the Troubles,” was part of a novel IRA campaign that waged war on financial centers in order to extract
both legs blown off), which was officially blamed on Ho Chi Minh. Although Lansdale was well aware British concessions during the difficult peace negotiations that lasted through most of the 1990s.
of General The’s authorship of these sophisticated attacks (the explosives were hidden in false Bishopsgate, in fact, was the second and most costly of three blockbuster explosions carried out by
compartments next to car gas tanks), he nonetheless championed the Cao Dai warlord as a patriot in the elite (and more or less autonomous) South Armagh IRA under the leadership of the legendary
the mould of Washington and Jefferson. After either French agents or Vietminh cadre assassinated The, “Slab” Murphy. Almost exactly a year earlier, they had set off a truck bomb at the Baltic Exchange in
Landsdale eulogized him to a journalist as “a good man. He was moderate, he was a pretty good St. Mary Axe that rained a million pounds of glass and debris on surrounding streets, killing 3 and
general, he was on our side, and he cost twenty-five thousand dollars.” wounding almost 100 people. The damage, although less than Bishopsgate, was still astonishing:
Whether by emulation or reinvention, car bombs showed up next in another war-torn French colony about 800 million pounds or more than the approximately 600 million pounds in total damage inflicted
– Algiers during the last days of the pied noirs or French colonial settlers. Some of the embittered over 22 years of bombing in Northern Ireland. Then, in 1996, with peace talks stalled and the IRA
French officers in Saigon in 1952-53 would also become cadres of the Organisation de l’Armé Secrete Army Council in revolt against the latest cease-fire, the South Armagh Brigade smuggled into England
(OAS), led by General Raoul Salan. In April 1961, after the failure of its uprising against French a third huge car bomb that they set off in the underground garage of one of the postmodern office
President Charles de Gaulle, who was prepared to negotiate a settlement with the Algerian rebels, the buildings near Canary Wharf Tower in the gentrified London Docklands, killing two and causing
OAS turned to terrorism – a veritable festival de plastique – with all the formidable experience of its nearly $150 million dollars in damage. Total damage from the three explosions was at least $3 billion.
veteran paratroopers and legionnaires. Its declared enemies included De Gaulle himself, French security As Jon Coaffee points out in her book on the impact of the bombings, if the IRA like the Tamil
forces, communists, peace activists (including philosopher and activist Jean-Paul Sartre), and especially Tigers or Al Qaeda had simply wanted to sow terror or bring life in London to a halt, they would have
Algerian civilians. The most deadly of their car bombs killed 62 Moslem stevedores lining up for work set off the explosions at rush-hour on a business day – instead, they “were detonated at a time when the
at the docks in Algiers in May 1962, but succeeded only in bolstering the Algerian resolve to drive all City was virtually deserted” – and/or attacked the heart of the transport infrastructure, as did the Islamist
the pied-noirs into the sea. suicide bombers who blew up London buses and subways in July 2005. Instead, Slab Murphy and his
The next destination for the car bomb was Palermo, Sicily. Angelo La Barbera, the Mafia capo of comrades concentrated on what they perceived to be a financial weak link: the faltering British and
Palermo-Center, undoubtedly paid careful attention to the Algerian bombings and may even have European insurance industry. To the horror of their enemies, they were spectacularly successful. “The
8 17
Hezbollah and Hamas combined. Although they have integrated car bombs into regular military tactics borrowed some OAS expertise when he launched his devastating attack on his Mafia rival, “Little
(for example, using kamikazes in trucks to open attacks on Sri Lankan army camps), their obsession Bird” Greco, in February 1963. Greco’s bastion was the town of Ciaculli outside Palermo where he
and “most prized theater of operation” in their struggle for Tamil independence has been the Sri Lankan was protected by an army of henchmen. La Barbera surmounted this obstacle with the aid of the Alfa
capital, Colombo, which they first car-bombed in 1987 in a grisly attack on the main bus terminal, Romeo Giulietta. “This dainty four-door family saloon,” writes John Dickie in his history of the Cosa
burning scores of passengers to death inside crowded buses. Nostra, “was one of the symbols of Italy’s economic miracle – ‘svelte, practical, comfortable, safe and
In January 1996, a Black Tiger – as the suicide elite are called – drove a truck containing 440 convenient,’ as the adverts proclaimed.” The first explosive-packed Giulietta destroyed Greco’s house;
pounds of military high explosives into the front of the Central Bank Building, resulting in nearly the second, a few weeks later, killed one of his key allies. Greco’s gunmen retaliated, wounding La
1,400 casualties. Twenty months later in October 1997 in a more complex operation, the Tigers attacked Barbera in Milan in May; in response, La Barbera’s ambitious lieutenants Pietro Torreta and Tommaso
the twin towers of the Colombo World Trade Center. They managed to maneuver through barricades Buscetta (later to become the most famous of all Mafia pentiti) unleashed more deadly Giuliettas.
and set off a car bomb in front of the Center, then battled the police with automatics and grenades. The On June 30, 1963, “the umpteenth Giulietta stuffed with TNT” was left in one of the tangerine
following March, a suicide mini-bus with shrapnel-filled bombs affixed to its sideboards was detonated groves that surround Ciaculli. A tank of butane with a fuse was clearly visible in the back seat. A
outside the main train station in the midst of a huge traffic jam. The 38 dead included a dozen children Giulietta had already exploded that morning in a nearby town, killing two people, so the carabinieri
in a school bus. were cautious and summoned army engineers for assistance. “Two hours later two bomb disposal
The Tamil Tigers are a mass nationalist movement with “liberated territory,” a full-scale army and experts arrived, cut the fuse, and pronounced the vehicle safe to approach. But when Lt. Mario Malausa
even a tiny navy; moreover, 20,000 Tiger cadres received secret paramilitary training in the Indian made to inspect the contents of the boot, he detonated the huge quantity of TNT it contained. He and
state of Tamil Nadu from 1983 to 1987, courtesy of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and India’s CIA – six other men were blown to pieces by an explosion that scorched and stripped the tangerine trees for
the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). But such sponsorship literally blew up in the face of the hundreds of metres around.” (The site is today marked by one of the several monuments to bomb
Indian Congress Party leadership when Indira’s son and successor Rajiv was killed by a female Tiger victims in the Palermo region.)
suicide bomber in 1993. Indeed, the all-too-frequent pattern of surrogate terrorism, whether sponsored Before this “First Mafia War” ended in 1964, the Sicilian population had learned to tremble at the
by the CIA, RAW, or the KGB, has been “return to sender” – most notoriously in the cases of those very sight of a Giulietta and car bombings had become a permanent part of the Mafia repertoire. They
former CIA “assets,” blind Sheik Rahman and Osama bin Laden. were employed again during an even bloodier second Mafia war or Matanza in 1981-83, then turned
The Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 was a different and startling species of blowback, against the Italian public in the early 1990s after the conviction of Cosa Nostra leaders in a series of
organized by two angry US veterans of the Gulf War rather than by Iraq or any Islamist group. Although sensational “maxi-trials.” The most notorious of these blind-rage car bombings – presumably organized
conspiracy theorists have made much of a strange coincidence that put Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef by ‘Tractor’ Provenzano and his notorious Corleonese gang – was the explosion in May 1993 that
near each other in Cebu City in the Philippines in November 1994, the design of the attack seems to damaged the world-famous Uffizi Gallery in the heart of Florence and killed 5 pedestrians, injuring 40
have been inspired by Timothy McVeigh’s obsession with that devil’s cookbook, The Turner Diaries. others.
Written in 1978, after Bloody Friday but before Beirut, neo-Nazi William Pierce’s novel describes
with pornographic relish how white supremacists destroy the FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. “The Black Stuff”
with an ANFO truck bomb, then crash a plane carrying a hijacked nuke into the Pentagon.
McVeigh carefully followed Pierce’s simple recipe in the novel (several tons of ammonium nitrate “We could feel the rattle where we stood. Then we knew we were onto something, and it took off from
in a parked truck) rather than Yousef’s more complicated WTC formula, although he did substitute there.” IRA veteran talking about the first ANFO car bomb
nitro racing fuel and diesel oil for ordinary heating oil. Nonetheless, the explosion that slaughtered 168
people in the Alfred Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995 was three times more powerful than The first-generation car bombs – Jaffa-Jerusalem, Saigon, Algiers, and Palermo – were deadly enough
any of the truck-bomb detonations that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and other federal (with a maximum yield usually equal to several hundred pounds of TNT), but required access to stolen
agencies had been studying at their test range in New Mexico. Experts were amazed at the radius of industrial or military explosives. Journeymen bomb-makers, however, were aware of a homemade
destruction: “Equivalent to 4,100 pounds of dynamite, the blast damaged 312 buildings, cracked glass alternative – notoriously dangerous to concoct, but offering almost unlimited vistas of destruction at a
as far as two miles away and inflicted 80 percent of its injuries on people outside the building up to a low cost. Ammonium nitrate is a universally available synthetic fertilizer and industrial ingredient with
half-mile away.” Distant seismographs recorded it as a 6.0 earthquake on the Richter scale. extraordinary explosive properties, as witnessed by such accidental cataclysms as an explosion at a
But McVeigh’s good-ole-boy bomb, with its diabolical demonstration of Heartland DIY ingenuity, chemical plant in Oppau, Germany in 1921 – the shock waves were felt 150 miles away and only a vast
was scarcely the last word in destructive power; indeed, it was probably inevitable that the dark Olympics crater remained where the plant had been – and a Texas City disaster in 1947 (600 dead and 90% of the
of urban carnage would be won by a home team from the Middle East. Although the casualty list (20 town structurally damaged). Ammonium nitrate is sold in half-ton quantities affordable by even the
dead, 372 wounded) wasn’t as long as Oklahoma City’s, the huge truck bomb that, in June 1996, most cash-strapped terrorist, but the process of mixing it with fuel oil to create an ANFO explosive is
alleged Hezbollah militants left outside Dhahran’s Khobar Towers – a high-rise dormitory used by US more than a little tricky as the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) found out in late 1971.
Air Force personnel in Saudi Arabia – broke all records in explosive yield, being the equivalent perhaps “The car bomb was [re]discovered entirely by accident,” explains journalist Ed Maloney in his The
of twenty 1,000-pound bombs. Moreover, the death toll might have been as large as the Marine barracks Secret History of the IRA, “but its deployment by the Belfast IRA was not. The chain of events began
in Lebanon in 1993 save for alert Air Force sentries who began an evacuation shortly before the in late December 1971 when the IRA’s quartermaster general, Jack McCabe, was fatally injured in an
explosion. Still, the blast (military-grade plastic explosive) left an incredible crater 85-feet wide and explosion caused when an experimental, fertilizer-based homemade mix known as the ‘black stuff’
35-feet deep. exploded as he was blending it with a shovel in his garage on the northern outskirts of Dublin. [The
Two years later, on August 7, 1998, al Qaeda claimed the championship in mass murder when it Provisional IRA’s] GHQ warned that the mix was too dangerous to handle, but Belfast had already
crashed suicide truck bombs into the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, received a consignment, and someone had the idea of disposing of it by dumping it in a car with a fuse
16 9
and a timer and leaving it somewhere in downtown Belfast.” The resulting explosion made a big Beginning in April 1992, for example, the occult Maoists of Sendero Luminoso came down from
impression upon the Belfast leadership. Peru’s altiplano to spread terror throughout the cities of Lima and Callao with increasingly more
The “black stuff” – which the IRA soon learned how to handle safely – freed the underground army powerful coche-bombas. “Large supplies of explosives,” the magazine Caretas pointed out, are “freely
from supply-side constraints: the car bomb enhanced destructive capacity yet reduced the likelihood of available in a mining nation,” and the senderistas were generous in their gifts of dynamite: bombing
Volunteers being arrested or accidentally blown up. The ANFO-car bomb combination, in other words, television stations and various foreign embassies as well as a dozen police stations and military camps.
was an unexpected military revolution, but one fraught with the potential for political and moral disaster. Their campaign eerily recapitulated the car bomb’s phylogeny as it progressed from modest detonations
“The sheer size of the devices,” emphasizes Moloney, “greatly increased the risk of civilian deaths in to a more powerful attack on the American embassy, then to Bloody-Friday-type public massacres
careless or bungled operations.” using 16 vehicles at a time. The climax (and Sendero’s chief contribution to the genre) was an attempt
The IRA Army Council led by Sean MacStiofain, however, found the new weapon’s awesome to blow up an entire neighborhood of “class enemies”: a huge ANFO explosion in the elite Miraflores
capabilities too seductive to worry about ways in which its grisly consequences might backfire on district on the evening of July 16 that killed 22, wounded 120, and destroyed or damaged 183 homes,
them. Indeed, car bombs reinforced the illusion, shared by most of the top leadership in 1972, that the 400 businesses and 63 parked cars. The local press described Miraflores as looking “as if an aerial
IRA was one final military offensive away from victory over the English government. Accordingly, in bombardment had flattened the area.”
March 1972, two car bombs were sent into Belfast city center followed by garbled phone warnings that If one of the virtues of an air force is the ability to reach halfway around the world to surprise
led police to inadvertently evacuate people in the direction of one of the explosions: Five civilians enemies in their beds, the car bomb truly grew wings during 1993 as Middle Eastern groups struck at
were killed along with two members of the security forces. Despite the public outcry as well as the targets in the Western Hemisphere for the first time. The World Trade Center attack on February 26 was
immediate traffic closure of the Royal Avenue shopping precinct, the Belfast Brigade’s enthusiasm for organized by master al-Qaeda bomb-maker Ramzi Yousef working with a Kuwaiti engineer named
the new weapon remained undiminished and the leadership plotted a huge attack designed to bring Nidal Ayyad and immigrant members of the Egyptian group, Gama’a al-Islamiyya, headed by Sheikh
normal commercial life in Northern Ireland to an abrupt halt. MacStiofain boasted of an offensive of Omar Abdul Rahman (whose US visa had reputedly been arranged by the CIA). Their extraordinary
“the utmost ferocity and ruthessness” that would wreck the “colonial infrastructure.” ambition was to kill tens of thousands of New Yorkers with a powerful lateral blast that would crack
On Friday, July 21st, IRA Volunteers left 20 car bombs or concealed charges on the periphery of the foundations of one WTC tower and topple it on its twin. Yousef’s weapon was a Ryder van packed
the now-gated city center, with detonations timed to follow one another at approximately five-minute with an ingenious upgrade of the classic IRA and Hezbollah ANFO explosive.
intervals. The first car bomb exploded in front of the Ulster Bank in north Belfast and blew both legs “The bomb itself,” writes Peter Lange in his history of the bombing, “consisted of four cardboard
off a Catholic passerby; successive explosions damaged two railroad stations, the Ulster bus depot on boxes filled with a slurry of urea nitrate and fuel oil, with waste paper as a binder. The boxes were
Oxford Street, various railway junctions, and a mixed Catholic-Protestant residential area on Cavehill surrounded by four-foot tanks of compressed hydrogen. They were connected by four 20-foot-long
Road. “At the height of the bombing, the center of Belfast resembled a city under artillery fire; clouds slow-burning fuses of smokeless powder wrapped in fabric. Yousef balanced on his lap four vials of
of suffocating smoke enveloped buildings as one explosion followed another, almost drowning out the nitroglycerine.” The conspirators had no difficulty parking the van next to the load-bearing south wall
hysterical screams of panicked shoppers.” A series of telephoned IRA warnings just created more of the North Tower, but the massive explosive proved too small – excavating a four-story deep crater in
chaos, as civilians fled from one explosion only to be driven back by another. Seven civilians and two the basement, killing 6 and injuring 1,000 people, but failing to bring the tower down. “Our calculations
soldiers were killed and more than 130 people were seriously wounded. were not very accurate this time,” wrote Ayyad in a letter. “However we promise you that next it would
Although not an economic knockout punch, “Bloody Friday” was the beginning of a “no business will [sic] be very precise and the Trade Center will be one of our targets.”
as usual” bombing campaign that quickly inflicted significant damage on the Northern Ireland economy, Two weeks after the WTC attack, a car bomb almost as powerful exploded in the underground
particularly its ability to attract private and foreign investment. The terror of that day also compelled parking garage of the Bombay Stock Exchange, severely damaging the 28-story skyscraper and killing
authorities to tighten their anti-car-bomb “ring of steel” around the Belfast city center, making it the 50 office workers. Twelve other car or motorcycle bombs soon detonated at other prestige targets,
prototype for other fortified enclaves and future “green zones.” In the tradition of their ancestors, the killing an additional 207 people and injuring 1,400. The bombings were revenge for sectarian riots a
Fenians, who had originated dynamite terrorism in the 1870s, Irish Republicans had again added new few months earlier in which Indian Hindus had killed hundreds of Indian Moslems. The attacks were
pages to the textbook of urban guerrilla warfare. Foreign aficionados, particularly in the Middle East, reputedly organized from Dubai by exiled Bombay underworld king Dawood Ibrahim at the behest of
undoubtedly paid close attention to the twin innovations of the ANFO car bomb and its employment in Pakistani intelligence. According to one account, Dawood sent three boats from Dubai to Karachi
a protracted bombing campaign against an entire urban-regional economy. where they were loaded with military explosives. Indian customs officials were then bribed to look the
What was less well understood outside of Ireland, however, was the enormity of the wound that the other way while the “black soup” was smuggled into Bombay.
IRA’s car bombs inflicted on the Republican movement itself. Bloody Friday destroyed much of the Corrupt officials were also rumored to have facilitated the suicide car bombing of the Israeli embassy
IRA’s heroic-underdog popular image, produced deep revulsion amongst ordinary Catholics, and gave in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 17, 1993 which killed 30 and injured 242. The next year, a
the British government an unexpected reprieve from the worldwide condemnation it had earned for the second “martyr,” later identified as a 29-year-old Hezbollah militant from southern Lebanon, leveled
Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry and internment without trial. Moreover, it gave the Army the perfect the seven-story Argentine-Israel Mutual Association, slaughtering 85 and wounding more than 300.
pretext to launch massive Operation Motorman: 13,000 troops led by Centurion tanks entered the “no- Both bombers carefully followed the Beirut template; as did the Islamist militant who drove his car
go” areas of Derry and Belfast and reclaimed control of the streets from the Republican movement. into the central police headquarters in Algiers in January 1995, killing 42 and injuring over 280.
The same day, a bloody, bungled car bomb attack on the village of Claudy in County Londonderry But the supreme acolytes of Hezbollah were the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, the only non-Moslem
killed 8 people. (Protestant Loyalist paramilitary groups – who never bothered with warnings and group that has practiced suicide car bombings on a large scale. Indeed, their leader Prabhaakaran
deliberately targeted civilians on the other side – would claim Bloody Friday and Claudy as sanctions “made a strategic decision to adopt the method of suicide attack after observing its lethal effectiveness
for their triple car bomb attack on Dublin during afternoon rush hour on May 17, 1974 which left 33 in the 1983 suicide bombings of the US and French barracks in Beirut.” Between their first such
dead, the highest one-day toll in the course of the “Troubles.”) operation in 1987 and 2000, they were responsible for twice as many suicide attacks of all kinds as
10 15
It was the greatest technology transfer of terrorist technique in history. There was no need for angry The Belfast debacle led to a major turnover in IRA leadership, but failed to dispel their almost cargo-
Islamists to take car-bomb extension courses from Hezbollah when they could matriculate in a CIA- cult-like belief in the capacity of car bombs to turn the tide of battle. Forced onto the defensive by
supported urban-sabotage graduate program in Pakistan’s frontier provinces. “Ten years later,” Coll Motorman and the backlash to Bloody Friday, they decided to strike at the very heart of British power
observes, “the vast training infrastructure that Yousef and his colleagues built with the enormous instead. The Belfast Brigade planned to send ten car bombs to London via the Dublin-Liverpool ferry
budgets endorsed by NSDD-166 – the specialized camps, the sabotage training manuals, the electronic using fresh volunteers with clean records, including two young sisters, Marion and Dolours Price.
bomb detonators, and so on – would be referred to routinely in America as ‘terrorist infrastructure.’” Snags arose and only four cars arrived in London; one of these was detonated in front of the Old
Moreover the alumni of the ISI training camps like Ramzi Yousef, who plotted the first 1993 World Bailey, another in the center of Whitehall, close to the Prime Minister’s house at Number 10 Downing
Trade Center attack, or his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who allegedly designed the second, Street. One hundred and eighty Londoners were injured and one was killed. Although the 8 IRA bombers
would soon be applying their expertise on every continent. were quickly caught, they were acclaimed in the West Belfast ghettoes and the operation became a
template for future Provisional bombing campaigns in London, culminating in the huge explosions
Cities under Siege (the 1990s) that shattered the City of London and unnerved the world insurance industry in 1992 and 1993.

“The hour of dynamite, terror without limit, has arrived.” Peruvian Journalist Gustavo Gorritti, 1992 Hell’s Kitchen (the 1980s)

Twenty-first century hindsight makes it clear that the defeat of the US intervention in Lebanon in “We are soldiers of God and we crave death. We are ready to turn Lebanon into another Vietnam.”
1983-84, followed by the CIA’s dirty war in Afghanistan, had wider and more potent geopolitical Hezbollah communiqué
repercussions than the loss of Saigon in 1975. The Vietnam War was, of course, an epic struggle whose
imprint upon domestic American politics remains profound, but it belonged to the era of the Cold Never in history has a single city been the battlefield for so many contesting ideologies, sectarian
War’s bipolar superpower rivalry. Hezbollah’s war in Beirut and south Lebanon, on the other hand, allegiances, local vendettas, or foreign conspiracies and interventions as Beirut in the early 1980s.
prefigured (and even inspired) the “asymmetric” conflicts that characterize the millennium. Moreover, Belfast’s triangular conflicts – three armed camps (Republican, Loyalist, and British) and their splinter
unlike peoples’ war on the scale sustained by the NLF and the North Vietnamese for more than a groups – seemed straightforward compared to the fractal, Russian-doll-like complexity of Lebanon’s
generation, car-bombing and suicide terrorism are easily franchised and gruesomely applicable in a civil wars (Shiite versus Palestinian, for example) within civil wars (Maronite versus Moslem and
variety of scenarios. Although rural guerrillas survive in rugged redoubts like Kashmir, the Khyber Druze) within regional conflicts (Israel versus Syria) and surrogate wars (Iran versus the United States)
Pass, and the Andes, the center of gravity of global insurgency has moved from the countryside back to within, ultimately, the Cold War. In the fall of 1971, for example, there were 58 different armed groups
the cities and their slum peripheries. In this post-Cold-War urban context, the Hezbollah bombing of in West Beirut alone. With so many people trying to kill each other for so many different reasons,
the Marine barracks has become the gold standard of terrorism; the 9/11 attacks, it can be argued, were Beirut became to the technology of urban violence what a tropical rainforest is to the evolution of
only an inevitable scaling-up of the suicide truck bomb to airliners. plants.
Washington, however, was loath to recognize the new military leverage that powerful vehicle Car bombs began to regularly terrorize Moslem West Beirut in the fall of 1981, apparently as part
bombs offered its enemies or even to acknowledge their surprising lethality. After the 1983 Beirut of an Israeli strategy to evict the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Lebanon. The Israeli
bombings, the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico began an intensive investigation into the secret service, the Mossad, had previously employed car bombs in Beirut to assassinate Palestinian
physics of truck bombs. Researchers were shocked by what they discovered. In addition to the deadly leaders (novelist Ghassan Kanfani in July 1972, for example), so no one was especially surprised when
air blast, truck bombs also produced unexpectedly huge ground waves. evidence emerged that Israel was sponsoring the carnage. According to Middle Eastern schoalr Rashid
“The lateral accelerations propagated through the ground from a truck bomb far exceed those Khalidi, “A sequence of public confessions by captured drivers made clear these [car bombings] were
produced during the peak magnitude of an earthquake.” Indeed, the scientists of Sandia came to the being utilized by the Israelis and their Phalangist allies to increase the pressure on the PLO to leave.”
conclusion that even an offsite detonation near a nuclear power plant might “cause enough damage to Journalist Robert Fisk was in Beirut when an “enormous [car] bomb blew a 45-foot-crater in the
lead to a deadly release of radiation or even a meltdown.” Yet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in road and brought down an entire block of apartments. The building collapsed like a concertina, crushing
1986 refused to authorize the emplacement of vehicle barriers to protect nuclear-power installations more than 50 of its occupants to death, most of them Shia refugees from southern Lebanon.” Several of
and made no move to alter an obsolete security plan designed to thwart a few terrorists infiltrating on the car bombers were captured and confessed that the bombs had been rigged by the Shin Bet, the
foot. Israeli equivalent of the FBI or the British Special Branch. But if such atrocities were designed to drive
Indeed, Washington seemed unwilling to learn any of the obvious lessons of either its Beirut defeat a wedge of terror between the PLO and Lebanese Moslems, they had the inadvertent result (as did the
or its secret successes in Afghanistan. The Reagan and Bush administrations appeared to regard the Israeli air force’s later cluster-bombing of civilian neighborhoods) of turning the Shias from informal
Hezbollah bombings as flukes, not as a powerful new threat that would replicate rapidly in the Israeli allies into shrewd and resolute enemies.
“blowback” of imperial misadventure and anti-Soviet escapades. Although it was inevitable that other The new face of Shiite militancy was Hezbollah, formed in mid-1982 out of an amalgamation of
insurgent groups would soon try to emulate Hezbollah, American planners – although partially Islamic Amal with other pro-Khomeini groupuscules. Trained and advised by the Iranian Pasdaran in
responsible – largely failed to foresee the extraordinary “globalization” of car bombing in the 1990s or the Bekaa Valley, Hezbollah was both an indigenous resistance movement with deep roots in the Shiite
the rise of sophisticated new strategies of urban destabilization that went with it. Yet by the mid-1990s, slums of southern Beirut and, at the same time, the long arm of Iran’s theocratic revolution. Although
more cities were under siege from bomb attacks than at any time since the end of World War Two, and some experts espouse alternative theories, Islamic Amal/Hezbollah is usually seen as the author, with
urban guerrillas were using car and truck bombs to score direct hits on some of the world’s most Iranian and Syrian assistance, of the devastating attacks on American and French forces in Beirut
powerful financial institutions. Each success, moreover, emboldened groups to plan yet more attacks during 1983. Hezbollah’s diabolic innovation was to marry the IRA’s ANFO car bombs to the kamikaze
and recruited more groups to launch their own “poor man’s air force.” – using suicide drivers to crash truckloads of explosives into the lobbies of embassies and barracks in
14 11
Beirut, and later into Israeli checkpoints and patrols in southern Lebanon. PART 2: RETURN TO SENDER
The United States and France became targets of Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian patrons after
the Multinational Force in Beirut, which supposedly had landed to allow for the safe evacuation of the
The CIA’s Car Bomb University (the 1980s)
PLO from that city, evolved into the informal and then open ally of the Maronite government in its civil
war against the Moslem-Druze majority. The first retaliation against President Reagan’s policy occurred
“The CIA officers that Yousef worked with closely impressed upon him one rule: never use the terms
on April 18, 1983, when a pickup truck carrying 2,000 pounds of ANFO explosives suddenly swerved
sabotage or assassination when speaking with visiting congressmen.” Steve Coll, Ghost Wars
across traffic into the driveway of the oceanfront U.S. embassy in Beirut. The driver gunned the truck
past a startled guard and crashed through the lobby door. “Even by Beirut standards,” writes former
Gunboat diplomacy had been defeated by car bombs in Lebanon, but the Reagan administration and,
CIA agent Robert Baer, “it was an enormous blast, shattering windows. The USS Guadalcanal, anchored
above all, CIA Director William Casey were left thirsting for revenge against Hezbollah. “Finally in
five miles off the coast, shuddered from the tremors. At ground zero, the center of the seven-story
1985,” according to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward in Veil, his book on Casey’s career, “he
embassy lifted up hundreds of feet into the air, remained suspended for what seemed an eternity, and
worked out with the Saudis a plan to use a car bomb to kill [Hezbollah leader] Sheikh Fadlallah who
then collapsed in a cloud of dust, people, splintered furniture, and paper.”
they determined was one of the people behind, not only the Marine barracks, but was involved in the
Whether as a result of superb intelligence or sheer luck, the bombing coincided with a visit to the
taking of American hostages in Beirut…It was Casey on his own, saying, ‘I’m going to solve the big
embassy of Robert Ames, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East. It killed him (“his
problem by essentially getting tougher or as tough as the terrorists in using their weapon – the car
hand was found floating a mile offshore, the wedding ring still on his finger”) and all six members of
bomb.’”
the Beirut CIA station. “Never before had the CIA lost so many officers in a single attack. It was a
The CIA’s own operatives, however, proved incapable of carrying out the bombing, so Casey
tragedy from which the agency would never recover.” It also left the Americans blind in Beirut, forcing
subcontracted the operation to Lebanese agents led by a former British SAS officer and financed by
them to scrounge for intelligence scraps from the French embassy or the British listening station offshore
Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar. In March 1984, a large car bomb was detonated about 50 yards from
on Cyprus. (A year later, Hezbollah completed their massacre of the CIA in Beirut when they kidnapped
Sheikh Fadlallah’s house in Bir El-Abed, a crowded Shiite neighborhood in southern Beirut. The
and executed the replacement station chief, William Buckley.) As a result, the Agency never foresaw
sheikh wasn’t harmed, but 80 innocent neighbors and passersby were killed and 200 wounded. Fadlallah
the coming of the mother-of-all-vehicle-bomb attacks.
immediately had a huge “MADE IN USA” banner hung across the shattered street, while Hezbollah
Over the protests of Colonel Gerahty, the commander of the U.S. Marines onshore in Beirut,
returned tit for tat in September when a suicide truck driver managed to break through the supposedly
Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor, Robert McFarlane, ordered the Sixth Fleet in September
impregnable perimeter defenses of the new US embassy in eastern (Christian) Beirut, killing 23
to open fire on Druze militia who were storming Lebanese Army Forces positions in the hills above
employees and visitors.
Beirut – bringing the United States into the conflict brazenly on the side of the reactionary Amin
Despite the Fadlallah fiasco, Casey remained an enthusiast for using urban terrorism to advance
Gemayel government. A month later, a five-ton Mercedes dump truck hurled past sandbagged Marine
American goals, especially against the Soviets and their allies in Afghanistan. A year after the Bir El-
sentries and smashed through a guardhouse into the ground floor of the “Beirut Hilton,” the U.S.
Abed massacre, Casey won President Reagan’s approval for NSDD-166, a secret directive that, according
military barracks in a former PLO headquarters next to the international airport. The truck’s payload
to Steve Coll in Ghost Wars, inaugurated a “new era of direct infusions of advanced US military
was an incredible 12,000 pounds of high explosives. “It is said to have been the largest non-nuclear
technology into Afghanistan, intensified training of Islamist guerrillas in explosives and sabotage
blast ever [deliberately] detonated on the face of the earth.” “The force of the explosion,” continues
techniques, and targeted attacks on Soviet military officers.”
Eric Hammel in his history of the Marine landing force, “initially lifted the entire four-story structure,
US Special Forces experts would now provide high-tech explosives and teach state-of-the-art
shearing the bases of the concrete support columns, each measuring fifteen feet in circumference and
sabotage techniques, including the fabrication of ANFO (ammonium nitrate-fuel oil) car bombs, to
reinforced by numerous one and three quarter inch steel rods. The airborne building then fell in upon
Pakistani intelligence service (or ISI) officers under the command of Brigadier Mohammed Yousef.
itself. A massive shock wave and ball of flaming gas was hurled in all directions.” The Marine (and
These officers, in turn, would tutor thousands of Afghan and foreign mujahedin, including the future
Navy) death toll of 241 was the Corps’ highest single-day loss since Iwo Jima in 1945.
cadre of al-Qaeda, in scores of training camps financed by the Saudis. “Under ISI direction,” Coll
Meanwhile, another Hezbollah kamikaze had crashed his explosive-laden van into the French
writes, “the mujahedin received training and malleable explosives to mount car-bomb and even camel-
barracks in West Beirut, toppling the eight-story structure, killing 58 soldiers. If the airport bomb
bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed to kill Soviet soldiers and commanders. Casey
repaid the Americans for saving Gemayal, this second explosion was probably a response to the French
endorsed these despite the qualms of some CIA career officers.”
decision to supply Saddam Hussein with Super-Etendard jets and Exocet missiles to attack Iran. The
Mujahedin car bombers, working with teams of snipers and assassins, not only terrorized uniformed
hazy distinction between local Shiite grievances and the interests of Tehran was blurred further when
Soviet forces in a series of devastating attacks in Afghanistan but also massacred leftwing intelligentsia
two members of Hezbollah joined with 18 Iraqi Shias to truck-bomb the U.S. embassy in Kuwait in
in Kabul, the country’s capital. “Yousef and the Afghan car-bombing squads he trained,” writes Coll,
mid-December. The French embassy, the control tower at the airport, the main oil refinery and an
“regarded Kabul University professors as fair game,” as well as movie theaters and cultural events.
expatriate residential compound were also targeted in what was clearly a stern warning to Iran’s enemies.
Although some members of the National Security Council reportedly denounced the bombings and
Following another truck bombing against the French in Beirut as well as deadly attacks on Marine
assassinations as “outright terrorism,” Casey was delighted with the results. Meanwhile, “by the late
outposts, the Multinational Force began to withdraw from Lebanon in February 1984. It was Reagan’s
1980s, the ISI had effectively eliminated all the secular, leftist, and royalist political parties that had
most stunning geopolitical defeat. In the impolite phrase of Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward,
first formed when Afghan refugees fled communist rule.” As a result, most of the billions of dollars
“Essentially we turned tail and ran and left Lebanon.” American power in Lebanon, added Thomas
that the Saudis and Washington pumped into Afghanistan ended up in the hands of radical Islamist
Friedman of the New York Times, was neutralized by “just 12,000 pounds of dynamite and a stolen
groups sponsored by the ISI. They were also the chief recipients of huge quantities of CIA-supplied
truck.”
plastic explosives as well as thousands of advanced E-cell delay detonators.

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